Crusaders

 Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth climbed to the podium today at a press conference to try to justify his administration's recent act of war against Iran. 

He mostly just managed to prove that his administration is every bit as fundamentalist and theocratic as the fundamentalist theocratic Iranian regime they are attacking. 

In the Iranian Islamist regime's warped ideology, they talk about the scientists killed by recent Israeli and U.S. airstrikes as "nuclear martyrs." 

But Hegseth, in trying to justify the United States's unprovoked aggression against the same regime, sounded eerily similar—invoking a similar language of martyrology.

"We give glory to God," he reportedly said—at the press conference. (Recall: this is a guy with a crusader tattoo linked to white nationalist groups.)

He was pointedly unable to justify the U.S.'s strikes on international law grounds. When pressed for intelligence showing Iran was actually about to produce a nuclear bomb—he drew a blank. 

Echoes of Iraq's missing WMDs, anyone? (Meanwhile Trump, of course, simply asserts they were there—evidence be damned.)

The fictitious Iranian nukes—like the conspicuously absent Iraqi ones before them—should perhaps be "entitled a wraith's progress"—

—as E.E. Cummings once wrote of Joe Gould's no-less notoriously non-existent "Oral History." 

Hegseth, then, can't explain why the U.S. was entitled to commit an act of blatant belligerence and aggression without a declaration of war or any plausible defensive justification. 

But he was able to quote a few of his stock fundamentalist phrases. "We give glory to God," he says. Is that so? Does God find the spectacle of maimed limbs and needless wars so glorious? 

I suspect not. I tend to think Robert Burns was closer to the truth—when he wrote: 

Ye hypocrites! are these your pranks?

To murder men, and give God thanks! 

Desist, for shame!—proceed no further

God won't accept your thanks for MURTHER!